Usman Khaliq

The Donald Cloud

2 minutes read

Yesterday, I came across this interesting cloud on Kaggle that was created around the silhouette of Hillary Clinton and was based on the database of her emails. Although not a fan of Trump, I decided to utilise the database of the Tweets from the first GOP debate and create a word cloud in the shape of a silhouette of the Donald’s picture.

However, there were a few caveats that I ran into. For one, my script is based in R, whereas all of my online search led me only to scripts and libraries in Python for creating a word cloud in the shape of a specific image. Thus, although I have been able to create a wordcloud of tweets during the debate that mentioned Trump and was able to colour-code them according to the sentiment of the tweets, my dream of creating a beautiful (almost as beautiful as his famed border-dividing wall is supposed to be), racist, hate-filled silhouette of that famous(or fake?) orange hair and smug face surrounded by a wordcloud of racist, vile tweets is partly on hold. For the moment, I have to make peace with a big, ugly blob of tweets mentioning Trump. Nevertheless, here is the code for this wordcloud, along with a description of the code.